Loveless
Nelyubov
Andrey Zvyagintsev (2017)
Andrey Zvyagintsev introduced the Sunday morning screening of Loveless at the London Film Festival with a joke. It was a good turnout, he said, at a time when the audience should really be in church. Ripple of complacent laughter through the Embankment Gardens cinema. In the event, the experience of watching this harshly censorious film wasn’t unlike being on the receiving end of pulpit admonition – though a hellfire preacher would have made the path to salvation clearer than Zvyagintsev does.
There were no more jokes once Loveless was underway – the title is putting it mildly. The protagonists Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) and Boris (Aleksey Rozin) aren’t just getting divorced: they detest each other – with, in Zhenya’s case, something approaching a passion. (Boris is too morosely undemonstrative fully to reciprocate.) Their only child, twelve-year-old Alexey (Matvey Novikov), is trapped in the miasma of his parents’ conflict – and this is emphatically not a tug of love: neither Zhenya nor Boris is keen on getting custody of the boy. The morning after a vicious shouting match between them, Alexey goes off to school and is never seen again. The central focus of the remainder of Loveless is the fruitless search for him.
Oleg Negin, who co-wrote Elena (2011) and Leviathan (2014) with Zvyagintsev, has sole screenplay credit on this new film. The place is Moscow, the time 2012. Alexey, in other words, is a child of the new millennium and of the regime of Vladimir Putin (who first became president in 2000, the year of Alexey’s birth). As portrayed by Zvyagintsev and Negin, modern-day Russia is a stew of primitive belief and hollow, materialistic pleasures. This is a land where, according to a radio report heard at one point in the film, popular expectation of imminent apocalypse is increasing; where the company employing Boris, headed by a fundamentalist Christian, has no place on its workforce for divorcees; and where self-absorption is epidemic. Rather than watching television news coverage of Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, people are engrossed in their mobile phone screen. (They could, of course, be watching or reading about the Ukraine conflict on their phone, but point taken.) Zhenya’s shallow self-centredness means looking after her body at the expense of her soul. She’s a creature of the salon where she both works and receives beauty treatments, keeping herself in trim for Anton (Andris Keišs), a wealthy man with whom she’s now in a relationship. Boris too has a new sexual partner, Masha (Marina Vasilyeva), who is expecting his baby.
Zvyagintsev appears to have decided to magnify the disagreeable qualities of Alexey’s parents for polemical purposes but this is counterproductive. Zhenya and Boris are so unpleasant and have so much more screen time than anyone else that it’s hard to take them as typical products of a rotten system. Thanks to Maryana Spivak’s insistent acting, Zhenya especially is a nearly pathological personality. She’s resoundingly unkind to Alexey; the story would make better metaphorical sense if, oblivious to her son’s needs and the effect the divorce is having on him, she was more casually callous. When the boy first goes missing, Zhenya and Boris drive to her mother’s home in case Alexey has gone there. Their car journey conversation may be the most rancorous heard on screen since that of the couple to whom Professor Borg gave a lift in Wild Strawberries (1957). Unlike Bergman’s pair, Zhenya and Boris are not, in any sense, in the back seat – and we’re stuck with them for the whole journey of the film.
Loveless is visually single-minded. White, black, grey and half-light dominate. Zvyagintsev and his resident cinematographer Mikhail Krichman give proceedings a funerary quality from the start, as Alexey walks home from school. He is, it turns out very understandably, in no hurry to get to the family home, which is now for sale. He makes his way through a deserted wood alongside a river. He picks up a length of red-and-white police tape from the base of one tree and throws it into the branches of another tree overhanging the river. This wordless, stately, deliberate opening is fraught with melancholy significance – even without knowing the story to follow (and I didn’t), you feel the film is bound to return eventually to this landscape, and it does – in winter. There’s snow on the ground. Alexey is nowhere to be seen. The dark trees are bare, except for the tape still entwined in one of them. In the intervening two hours, the visual tone has hardly changed. The look of Anton’s sleek, modern, soulless apartment is no less dispiriting than the basement of a disused, dilapidated building where the only remaining trace of the missing boy – the coat he was wearing when he disappeared – is discovered.
The search includes a brace of scenes in which it seems Alexey may have been found. First, a boy answering to his description has turned up and is now in hospital; Zhenya arrives at his bedside only to be (predictably) disappointed. Later, in a morgue, the co-ordinator of a volunteer search and rescue team uncovers a corpse, for both parents to see. In this shocking and clever sequence, Zhenya’s violent upset when the sheet is pulled back makes you think at first that the dead body is Alexey’s. It transpires that the mother’s spasm of screams and tears is a mixture of horror at what she’s beholding and relief that this is not her son. An unexpected reappearance after an unexplained absence was the starting point of Zvyagintsev’s The Return (2003). A happy ending to the search for Alexey in Loveless is out of the question: the audience almost immediately abandons the hope with which we normally watch a lost child story – and not just because the tape in the riverside tree stays in the mind throughout as a clue to where Alexey has ended up. The film’s bleak register is pervasive, its measured tempo authoritative and its condemnatory force unarguable. If Alexey were to turn up safe and well, that would in effect let his parents off the hook – unless, in the meantime, they’d decided to mend their ways. Their doing so would, in Zvyagintsev’s scheme, amount to a moral advance of the society they exemplify, which would dilute the force of his critique. Instead, at the end of Loveless, Boris is a father again – in the cramped conditions in which he, Masha and their baby are living, a glowering, impatient one. Zhenya goes out onto the balcony of Anton’s apartment to do some treadmill keep-fit: I may have imagined this but wondered if she was in the early stages of pregnancy – preparing, in other words, also to be a terrible parent once more.
Alexander Rodnyansky, one of the film’s producers, joined Zvygintsev and the latter’s interpreter on the stage before the LFF screening. Rodnyansky suggested that, while the film was very much about Russia, it also raised issues relevant to many other societies today. You can understand why he and Zvyagintsev would take that circumspect line at home, even if it’s now fruitless to do so: Leviathan, which Rodnyansky also produced, went down so badly with the Russian Ministry of Culture that Loveless was made without any financial support from national government. What Rodnyansky said is true to the extent that divorce, self-indulgence and mobile-phone tunnel-vision are international. It’s not true in important other ways – for example, in the fact that the police do as little as possible to find Alexey and leave this to the group of volunteers. This is evidently a major element of the story for Andrey Zvyagintsev. When Loveless premiered at Cannes (where it won this year’s Jury Prize), he was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying that ‘The modern-day police don’t care about people …They act as a wall between people and power, and they have turned to power’. It can’t be supposed that he was talking about national police forces more generally.
There are certainly suggestions that the malaise being described is older than the present political regime in Russia. Zhenya is malignant enough to make you wonder if she was fucked-up-in-her-turn and so it proves. She says at one point that she doesn’t think she’s ever loved anyone except, when she was a child, her mother. That love, Zhenya says, wasn’t returned; her mother’s brief appearance in the story makes this all too easy to believe. But it’s hard to see Loveless as anything more than an exercise in stylish misanthropy when its scathing scope broadens in this way – and its censure is occasionally bizarre. The lugubrious chill of the bed scenes between Boris and Masha, then Zhenya and Anton, implies that the director views extra-marital sex as deplorable per se. We get that, while Zhenya and Boris indulge their carnal appetites, their affection-starved child is vanishing from the face of the earth. Why these sequences of loveless lovemaking should be so extended is less clear. (And, to be honest, the strength of the animosity between Zhenya and Boris makes you almost grateful for the small mercy that they don’t get on so badly with their new sexual partners.) For liberal western audiences at least, Zvyagintsev is on surer ground when you feel his target is specifically Putin’s Russia – especially when recent real-life developments supply an extra edge to the film. The soundtrack includes a radio news item about the US presidential election of 2012: we naturally think how much less actively interested Russia was in that contest than in the one four years later. When, in the closing sequence, Zhenya goes on the treadmill and looks straight into the camera, she’s wearing a tracksuit with ‘Russia’ emblazoned on it. The obvious symbolism – Zhenya represents her country – is confused by post-2012 revelations of the scale of systematised doping in Russian sport. Her outfit now screams drugs cheat.
8 October 2017